Use, Exchange, and Speculation: The Politics of Inhabitance and the Right to the City in Urban Peru

The protagonist of Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” is the citaden, a citizen-denizen whose rights are produced through residency and incumbent contributions to everyday urban life. Yet, in the shantytowns of Lima where people have long believed that residency generates rights, what it means to “do residency” (hacer vivencia) is itself contested. Drawing on twenty-one months of fieldwork in the Limeño shantytown of Pachacútec, Peru, I show that “inhabitance” is a multidimensional construct and that the relationship between inhabitance and rights to spatial appropriation and political participation is a primary source of conflict, generating questions about community belonging, democratic representation, and the moral status of property transfers. Far from neatly resolving the inequalities generated by capitalist property relations, this case demonstrates that Lefebvre’s “right to the city” entails many of its own questions: What actions constitute residency? Do people have differential rights based on differential contributions to community life? And can rights to space be earned, leading to tenure security, or must they always be actively performed? As Peruvians answer these questions in the course of building their cities and their lives, they illuminate the ambiguities and challenges inherent in realizing the “right to the city” in Latin America's urban peripheries.